The present disclosure relates generally to the electrical, electronic and computer arts and, more particularly, to semiconductor chips that self-destruct upon exposure to light.
Silicon-based integrated circuits and other electronic devices are usually intended to function indefinitely. Certain applications, however, could possibly benefit from the ability to disable such devices should there be an attempt to tamper with them.
Thin-film heterojunction field-effect transistors (HJFETs) have been developed having crystalline silicon (c-Si) channels, amorphous hydrogenated silicon gate regions (a-Si:H) and hydrogenated crystalline silicon source and drain regions. Normally-off HJFETs are obtained by incorporating an a-Si:H blocking stack in the gate heterojunction of the HJFET devices to suppress gate leakage at forward-bias conditions. Such HJFETs have been proposed for used in the pixel circuits of AMOLED backplanes.